Really interesting book. I read that back when it came out. 1975 or so. I was in HS. Really opened up some avenues for me.
Science fiction author Neal Stephenson wrote "Snow Crash" which is interesting on multiple levels and which is explicitly influenced by Julian Jayne's seminal work.
Trying to explain the joys of reading to a non-reader seems like explaining Impressionist painting to the blind.
I was lucky, Mom taught me to read at home before I started school; Grimm’s fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, Asterix and Obelix, Tin-Tin, what ever, as long as I read.
By the third grade I had my first library card and Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Morte d’ Arthur, Haliburton’s books of marvels, Gene Rhodes western stories were a world opened before me.
To add to your recommendations could I suggest John LeCarre’s Cold war era novels, especially “A Perfect Spy” , Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” WWI memoir as well as the Claudius novels and “The White Goddess”, Izaak Walton’s “The Compleat Angler”...and I should stop, it’s late.
.. and the nonfiction Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
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Thought that was a great book. But I think he got descartes wrong—but then mostly because the writer is a unitarian like his father. Also his take on OT people seemed off to me. But then I’m not averse to supenatural explanations.
For example three years ago I went through a non invasive cryogenic ablation that cured my atrial fibrillation. It was a four hour procedure in a bitter cold room filled with computers. I was out cold and out of the hospital the next day and back at the gym working out a week later. To the doctor it was a day at work. But the procedure was pure science fiction 10 years before. To me what happened was a miracle.
All that said, the author does a very creditable job of describing the change in consciousness that occurred in the first millenium BC in the middle eastern basin. As well, he does a great job of showing how the new world indians that the spanish encountered were much like the ancient near east of the 3rd millenium bc.